


Show Your Hand

by rthstewart



Category: Star Wars Legends: Thrawn Trilogy - Timothy Zahn
Genre: Gen, Humor, Nursing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 06:36:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2841560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rthstewart/pseuds/rthstewart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karrde is injured.  Mara tenderly nurses him back to health.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Show Your Hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Port](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Port/gifts).



This was an unexpected feeling.

_I hurt._

_A lot._

Karrde tensed and tried to get his bearings, keeping his eyes closed to fool anyone observing. He heard first and immediately recognized the unique thrum of engines. So, he was on the _Wild Karrde_ and they were not in hyperspace. That faint antiseptic smell, rhythmic beeps, and the hard thing he was lying on meant he was in the medical bay.

Had they been raided? Boarded? As his mind caught up with his first, instinctual response to assess the situation, whatever had mowed him down didn’t seem to have impacted his ship and crew.

So why _was_ he in the med ward feeling like he’d been chewed up and spit out by a rancor who’d found him indigestible?

 _A meeting_. He’d been going to a meeting…

“No use trying to fake it, Karrde. I know you’re awake.”

He slowly turned his head toward the familiar voice and opened his eyes. Mara was sitting in the chair next to his bunk.

“Anyone else hurt?”  His mouth was so dry the words came out as a sticky croak.

Mara’s eyes flicked over the readouts embedded in the bunk's controls, though he could tell from the speed and timbre of the beeps that he felt worse than he actually was.

“Not our people. But a lot of innocents were taken out when the casino blew.”

He saw a cup of what was hopefully water on the side table, tried reaching for it, and fell back again, hissing with pain. 

“You’re lucky it’s not worse,” Mara said. She picked up the cup and held it to his lips so could take a few careful sips of the warm, flat water. It didn’t taste as if she’d laced it with any narcotic.

“From how I feel, worse would be pretty bad.”

“How much do you remember?”

“We dropped outside Le Yer. You and I were going to meet someone from Zann about the SoroSuub cloaking device. We took a floatboat to the casino.”

Mara nodded. “And just as we were clearing security…”

“I was bribing the guard. The last thing I remember was that I thought she was too cheap.”

“Maybe she was trying to get us inside. I felt something happen before it actually did. I was able to throw up a Force shield around us both but the concussion was bad. Fortunately, it threw us out of the building and into the street.”

“That explains the ringing in my ears, the throbbing headache, and the hurt in places I didn’t know I had.”

“You were concussed. Aves was monitoring the channels and knew there was trouble. We were out of there before the emergency responders arrived. You’ve been sleeping it off the last two days.”

Karrde shifted on the bunk and winced again. “Remind me to thank Skywalker for teaching you a _useful_ skill.”

“I eagerly await his next instruction on how I should meditate more and do less,” Mara replied dryly. “Should I thank him for you? Or would that lead to you owing what you don’t want to pay back?”

“Really, Mara, I’ve trained you better than that. You should have determined whether a debt owed a Jedi is something I want to avoid and then leverage that to get something out of me."

“I thought about it, but the odds of a reward for bold ingenuity were at least as great as you assigning me scut work for threatening you.”

Finding the conversation difficult on his back, Karrde tried to move and again found it too painful. _So this is what being hurtled 20 meters felt like?_ He didn’t want to repeat the experiment.

“Let me help you; you shouldn’t be moving much just yet.”

He could add _deft sickroom nurse_ to Mara’s eclectic list of talents. She manipulated the controls so the bed’s headrest rose slowly enough for him to manage the change in position without needles of lancing agony and then adjusted his pillow and tucked the mussed thermal wrap back around his legs. The exertion left him exhausted but more comfortable and he accepted more water.

“We’ve got some liquid nutrient matrix in the stores. I’ll bring that later.”

“I don’t think I could chew just yet,” Karrde agreed, slowly working his jaw. “Where are we?”

“A nice bit of nowhere that Aves dropped us into after getting us out of Abredgado-rae. We’re monitoring the chatter about the explosion, listening in on the HoloNet and subchannels, and trying to splice into the Zann Consortium’s networks for any intel.”

“Any ideas whether we were the actual target? Or did we just get caught in someone else’s cross-fire?”

Mara shook her head. “It could be some of both.  Black Sun wouldn't want to be competing with us for the cloaking device; maybe it was a power grab to assassinate you and me.  Either way, someone killed 72 sentients to do it.”

“Well, keep looking. If we blundered into something between Black Sun and Zann, we’ll be able to sell that – maybe even to New Republic Intelligence."   That was payback he and Mara would both enjoy dispensing and having NRI owe them a favor was always a good outcome.

His head was beginning to pound like a band with a thunder drum. He settled back into the cot as comfortably as he could manage.

“You’re hurting,” Mara said. “You’re due for pain meds.”

“I’m not taking those.” He hated them. The ones on the _Wild Karrde_ always made him feel worse than what they were trying to relieve. Pain, at least, sharpened the mind.

“Pain slows healing,” Mara countered. “You won’t get better if you don’t take your medicine.”

“Says the one who uses Force healing and not narcotics.”

“You’re acting like a child.”

“And you are my employee, not my parent.”

“Fine,” Mara snapped. “The longer you are out, the longer I'm in charge."

He knew where this was leading.  "Mara..."

"Just to let you know, Ghent is complaining again about the positioning of the Holonet transreceivers on the hull. So, I'll tell him he can do that deep space walk to adjust them.”

The thought was horrifying. It was also a bluff. “I know what you are doing, Mara, and it won’t work.”

“I haven’t told you how we exercised Sturm and Drang this morning? They’ve been confined on ship for too long and were getting very edgy, so I developed a plan.”

“Mara…”

“I ping them with the Force and then they chase me down the corridors of the ship, with Chin trying to hold on to their leashes.”

“Mara…”

“They’ve only gotten loose once. Maybe twice. I think some of the crew are getting too slow and lazy, so I'll put them between me and the vornskrs, and we can see who runs faster.”

“Mara…”

She held up the hated bottle. “Take two of these and I’ll even give you your datapad.”

Karrde decided Mara was a terrible sickroom nurse.


End file.
